Atom is mainly used in netbooks, nettops, embedded applications ranging from health care to advanced robotics, mobile Internet devices (MIDs) and phones.

[2] In December 2012, Intel launched the 64-bit Centerton family of Atom CPUs, designed specifically for use in servers.

[6] Centerton adds features previously unavailable in Atom processors, such as Intel VT virtualization technology and support for ECC memory.

The more expensive lower-power Silverthorne parts was to be used in Intel mobile Internet devices (MIDs) whereas Diamondville was to be used in low-cost desktop and notebooks.

[11] In April 2008, a MID development kit was announced by Sophia Systems[12] and the first board called CoreExpress-ECO was revealed by a German company LiPPERT Embedded Computers, GmbH.

Intel has applied the Atom branding to product lines targeting several different market segments, including: MID/UMPC/Smartphone, Netbook/Nettop, Tablet, Embedded, Wireless Base Stations (for 5G networking infrastructure), Microserver/Server and Consumer electronics.

[28] This enables relatively good performance with only two integer ALUs, and without any instruction reordering, speculative execution, or register renaming.

The Bonnell microarchitecture therefore represents a partial revival of the principles used in earlier Intel designs such as P5 and the i486, with the sole purpose of enhancing the performance per watt ratio.

However, Hyper-Threading is implemented in an easy (i.e., low power) way to employ the whole pipeline efficiently by avoiding typical single thread dependencies.

[33] Based on this collaboration, in 2012, Intel announced a new system on chip (SoC) platform designed for smartphones and tablets which would use the Atom line of CPUs.

[35] This range competed with existing SoCs developed for the smartphone and tablet market from companies like Texas Instruments, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Samsung.

[37] Embedded processors based on the ARM version 7 instruction set architecture (such as Nvidia's Tegra 3 series, TI's 4 series and Freescale's i.MX51 based on the Cortex-A8 core, or the Qualcomm Snapdragon and Marvell Armada 500/600 based on custom ARMv7 implementations) offer similar performance to the low end Atom chipsets[dubious – discuss] but at roughly one quarter the power consumption, and (like most ARM systems) as a single integrated system on a chip, rather than a two chip solution like the current Atom line.

[38][39][40][41] The Xcore86 (also known as the PMX 1000) is x586 based System on Chip (SoC) that offers a below average thermal envelope compared to the Atom.

Cisco stated, "we expect product failures to increase over the years, beginning after the unit has been in operation for approximately 18 months".

Soon after, The Register[45] broke the news that this issue was linked to the Intel Atom SoC, and reports of other vendors[46] being affected started appearing online.